The Nightstar Zoo

...on. At the very least.

Was there something in the (stellar) envelope that took over the ship?

Somebody was asking about the blight...

Or they decided slightly more theft was in order.

Curious scenario. If it's enemy action, it's an enemy that already knows where the stellar envelope is so poking holes in another ship is the least of things it could do. I'd most likely anticipate Petey shenanigans, but he'd send out a single AI so having a conversation in the ship makes a little less sense.

Illegally operating ship under command of a highly unethical company is ordered to collect unimaginably wealthy information, decides to steal some and cut amd run instead of giving it all to its dark masters.

News at 11.

Those are some pretty bold suppositions. Nothing so far suggests it's operating illegally. Secretly, yes, but there is nothing illegal about operation security.

As for the ethicality, of course they're unethical, it's a mega-corp.


My take: Burglar ship has been hijacked by the very data it was gathering.

Doesn't explain the conversation at the end (about the point defense cannons), unless the crew was hijacked as well by something with multiple personalities. It's entirely possible of course, but I think it's more likely the (unsubverted) crew simply got greedy and decided they could get a better deal somewhere else. How that ties in to the larger story arc is to be determined.

_________________
The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

This isn't just a mega-corp, it's Urtheep Industries, who launched the brainjacking raid on Parnassus Dom, murdered tens of thousand of the police force and used their bodies as zombie attack drones, and planned to use them to nuke a city and start a civil war that would have crippled the UNS amidst millions of corpses.

As for illegal operations, hey, I'm just going by what the Purse crew members said about stealing the data.

Ooh, I hadn't noticed the company name! Except the "brainjacking raid" was on Dom Atlantis, not Parnassus Dom. Petey would never have allowed brainjacking to go that far in his house.

Actually all that was traced back to the Schuul, and I suspect that the hijacked taters were supplied not by Urtheep Industries (who had the contract to supply the DA Police with the M3 Taters) but by Schuul agents.

Bit of A, bit of B. I imagine Urtheep has been infiltrated by Schuul agents, and hence did tender the tampered taters. It's also a pretty decent explanation of what's going on - the Schuul first strike against the UNS flopped. They've got to be pretty desperate to claim any advantage they can right now. Maybe a stellar envelope looked too tempting for some agents to resist?

And I imagine that if somebody had tried it, their oceans would still be boiling all these months later.

Or perhaps counter brain jack the entire organization of the brain jackers, because he can.

Alternatively, teraport into the head office and tell them off, as well as leave a very big bomb that will go off if anyone tampers with it. Petey seems to be very big on the non-killing people thing now, while letting people kill themselves if they want to.

I'm wondering if the UNS hasn't already done something like that to the Schuul. They are precisely the vengeful type who would as a retaliatory strike.

_________________
The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

Except the Schuul share a planet with the UNS. Celeschuul is one of the first extrasolar colonies. They couldn't boil the oceans without killing a whole lot of non-Schuul UNS citizens.

It's also unlikely that all the Schuul are in on this. It's bad form to murder everybody because there's a faction who hates you. It rarely turns out well.

Only if you don't get every last one of them.

_________________
The MacNut
Artist and writer of The Vanguard, a space opera superhero comic.

But that also makes you a threat to everybody else around . . .

--FreeFlier

It looks like the crew just decided to swipe some valuable information and split, rather than getting hijacked (yet) which seems like kind of a weird decision. I'd have thought they'd want to wait to get more data storage and more time to examine the data and find the really good bits. A stellar envelope must take a really long time to exhaustively search. I guess maybe they got really lucky and found the PTU production process or something similarly valuable. Still odd that they fired on the transport instead of just leaving, but maybe they started the deletion process for what they found and wanted to make sure no one connected in time to suspend it.

A Blight-like thing would have even less reason to open fire, though. It could have hijacked the freighter too and used the storage it was transporting to extract more data from the stellar envelope. It can't possibly have stuffed all the info it cares about into that tiny scout ship.